Jack in the Box Introduces New Bacon Insider Burger

The Guilty Pleasure: Bacon Insider Where To Get It:Jack in the Box, locations Valleywide Price: $4.99 (your mileage may vary) What It Really Costs: About 730 calories, almost 400 from fat.

For some time now, bacon has been almost fetishized by all manner of culinary folk. It's understandable. Bacon is delicious, end of story. I've seen it used in countless creative ways, from bacon brittle candy to Pig & Pickle's adding it to a vegan burger (sadly, no longer on the menu) for no extra charge.

The bacon frenzy has made it down the restaurant ladder to fast food. Jack in the Box recently introduced a new burger dubbed the Bacon Insider. It offers a bacon triple threat. There are two layers of bacon on the burger, bacon in the mayonnaise, and even bacon pieces mixed into the patty.

Jack even followed a trend and put it on a premium brioche bun. The bun is decent, if unremarkable, but it isn't brioche. Real brioche involves butter and eggs. Jack's brioche has palm oil and no eggs. The traditional egg wash that brioche gets is replaced by a mix that's mostly water and soy protein. C'mon, Jack, your friend Wendy figured out how to put actual butter and eggs in her brioche.

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Inside the burger is, for the most part, fairly well thought out. The bacon strips are the fast food standard issue paper-thin model that the chain's always had, nothing here nor there about them. The bacon mayo seemed to do the most to bolster the bacon flavor. This is likely due to umami-bomb bacon flavoring added, of which there is more in the mayo than actual bacon.

To my surprise, the bacon mixed into the beef patty barely registered on my palate. In retrospect, it makes sense; when the bacon and beef are separate ingredients, each can make its presence known. When mixed together, the bacon becomes little more than a chewy nub in an otherwise soft piece of meat.

All told, it's not a bad burger, but it's not leaps and bounds over a regular bacon cheeseburger. It's a fun one for fast food junkies to try at least once for the novelty of a bacon three-way.